Welcome to this IBM Rational podcast, Rapid. Response to Feedback, Continuous Delivery in a Mobile World.

Transcription

1 IBM PodcastError! Bookmark not defined. [ MUSIC ] Welcome to this IBM Rational podcast, Rapid Response to Feedback, Continuous Delivery in a Mobile World. I'm Kimberly Gist with IBM. Obtaining feedback from users of mobile apps is critical to determining the quality of the applications. But what do you do with the feedback? The most successful organizations leverage automation to rapidly respond to that feedback and deliver mobile apps that are truly engaging. In today's podcast, Derek Baron, product manager for mobile products, joins us to explore the value of new IBM capabilities that can continuously integrate, test, deploy, and release mobile apps, reducing cycle times to respond faster to feedback. Derek, welcome to the Rational Talks to You podcast series. Thank you for joining us today. Thanks, Kimberly. It's great to be here. Well, why don't we jump right into it with our first question. Derek, how important would you say is continuous delivery of mobile apps to an organization? -1-

2 Well, the clients I work with say it's business critical. And let me illustrate what I mean with just a story. I'll tell you a story about JKE Bank, which is actually a fictitious company but based on a true story. So, JKE just recently released their signature iphone app. That's the app that really represents their company, it's the chase of their company. Unfortunately, user sentiment stinks because for six weeks the ratings and feedback have shown that they're missing a key feature. JKE is also frustrated because developing anything for them, even just putting a comment in a line of code, takes a long time, about two months to go from development and into operations. And at the same time, had they even known about the issue, the missing feature, it would have been relatively easy to fix, you know, in the first place. Now, JKE is not alone. It's kind of a recurring pattern that we see over and over again. Well, then, I guess JKE isn't delivering a five-star app, then, because I know when I download an app to my phone, if it gives me problems in the first I would say 10 minutes, I delete it [LAUGHTER]. That's right. That's exactly right. And -2-

3 that's what everybody does. So, I think, you know, the lesson that we could learn is that the very best mobile application, those are four- and five-star apps, evolve rapidly and respond to feedback in need. And so the problem with doing that is twofold. Number one, it takes too long and costs to much to go from an idea and into operations for your mobile app. And then second is actually getting the right level of quality. And by "quality," what I really mean is the right experience and the feel that the app needs to exceed expectations. So, Derek, can you give my listeners some ideas to help them go faster with this process? Yes, absolutely. A process of continuous deployment is a great place to start. Most mobile development teams, they already do continuous integration, which is a well-known practice. And what that means is that their teams are continuously building and unit testing their app as changes are made by the developers. And what's key is getting the operations team, who's usually separate from the development team, to be able to automatically deploy those test and builds into your testing and integration environment automatically. You'd like that handoff to be very agile. -3-

4 According to a recent [public lab] survey -- they publish a report called the Developer Pulse Survey percent of companies who do these kinds of DevOps processes use deployment automation like I just described. So, we offered this at IBM with IBM UrbanCode. And we've integrated it in with our MobileFirst platform. And we're continuously adding new automated deployment capabilities around the mobile space. You know, we even have partners like App Pure [INAUDIBLE] who's a device [INAUDIBLE] that integrate with Urban Code deploy and allow you to automate deployment of your app out into a set of devices that are on the App Pure [INAUDIBLE] cloud. Well, that's wonderful, Derek. What about the quality and feedback issues that you mentioned earlier? Right. So, speed is really important. I mean, that's what we just talked about. And automated deployment helps you get faster. But in the mobile app world, quality means everything. The cost of core sentiment, low ratings and feedback is very high. So, I'm very excited to share with our listeners today that -4-

5 we've just delivered an open beta for our new mobile quality assurance offering. And here's how it works. When you're doing your development process, when you're ready to have people test your app, you use the MQA service. That's mobile quality assurance. You use the service to actually distribute over the air to the testers. So, they get the app on their devices and they can start testing. And if they're testing the app, if they want to submit a bug, they just shake the device. And the dialogue pops up and they can submit a bug. If the app crashes for some reason, the system automatically gathers a detailed crash log, and that's sent automatically to the developers that built the application. Now, once you're done with your sort of testing cycle and you actually launch it, your users can submit in app feedback. Rather than going to the app store, they can just do it right from within their phone by shaking it. And they can also get crash logs. So, if the app crashes for an end user, that information is fed automatically back into your development. We're also about to add in some additional capability that does app store analytics, which means that the system goes out and kind of trolls the app stores and analyzes all kinds of dimensions essential to figure out if people liked your -5-

6 app, how much they liked it. So, all of this is about streamlining that feedback group from the users back into the development process very early and every often. It's a great strategy to help you deliver five stars. Wow. So, a mobile quality assurance offering now has a shake factor. Who would've thought. How can people participate in the open beta, Derek? Right. So, let me give you the short URL. If you're familiar with bitly, that's a way that we can provide the shortened URL. So, just launch your Web browser to -- b-i-t --.ly/mobile-quality-assurance. And that will get you right to the open beta. And you can sign up. It's free. Get access to the service and start using it. And we'd love your feedback. Well, thank you, Derek. A great overview on continuous delivery in the mobile world. We really appreciate you taking the time to join us and share expertise today. Thank you. I'm looking forward to everyone checking out the new open beta, and good luck with your DevOps endeavors. -6-

7 That was Derek Baron, product manager for mobile products, with some key points for today's podcast event, Rapid Response to Feedback, Continuous Delivery in a Mobile World. We'd like to invite our listeners to also visit that open beta link that Derek gave. It is a bitly app that will be available in the reprocess section next to where you downloaded this podcast. To hear this specific podcast or to browse additional topics, check out our Rational Talks to You podcast page at This has been an IBM podcast. I'm your moderator, Kimberly Gist. Thank you for listening, and we hope that you will choose to keep tuning in as Rational Talks to You. IBM Podcast [MUSIC] [END OF SEGMENT] -7-